Official Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty Video Card Recommendation Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
777 words · ~3 min read
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Today's episode of my video blog is actually going to be something I've
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never done before. This is a sneak preview of an upcoming NCIX PC
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newsletter. So, our newsletter goes out to all of our subscribers and uh it's an
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official NCIX communication and this particular one is going to be themed
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around uh Starcraft 2 as well as the GTX
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460. So, I've actually got a GTX 460 with me today. This is MSI's GeForce GTX
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460 1 gig cyclone OC card. That means it
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has an aftermarket cooler. It is factory overclocked and it's a 460 with 1 gig of
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video memory. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about Starcraft 2 in
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general. So, this article here, actually, if you're not subscribed to
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the MCX newsletter, and if you're not getting the PC newsletters about once or
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twice a month, you should definitely subscribe. If you go to uh NCIX
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and you go to Wow, it's been so long. Oh
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yeah, newsletters up at the top, then you can actually subscribe to our weekly
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uh weekly specials and all of our other newsletters. So, make sure you do that.
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Anyway, so this is going to be an upcoming PC newsletter. As a bit of a
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joke, we talk about the uh Brood War system specifications required by
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Blizzard versus the Wings of Liberty recommended specs. And uh you know, if
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you're not um if you haven't upgraded your PC since Brood War, you're probably
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going to be looking at a bit of an upgrade here. And we just talk a little
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bit about what the recommended configurations are for Starcraft 2. So
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really, that's the point of this video is what are the recommended
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configurations for Starcraft 2? Well, there's two levels from Blizzard and one
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of them is a fairly basic PC. Basically, the graphics card they recommend is
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about five plus years old, and they're saying that's what it takes to run the
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game. And then they have kind of a recommended level, and we've positioned
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a couple different PCs around their minimum spec as well as their
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recommended spec. But really, if you want to get the most out of it, I turn
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to my friends at Hardware Connects because they did a terrific GPU roundup.
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You can see we've actually featured that here because it is a third party site
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that really just took a whole bunch of cards from ATI as well as NVIDIA, put
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them through the ringer on Starcraft 2, and they came up with a recommendation
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that makes a lot of sense and we're seeing echoed all over the place. The
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GeForce GTX 460. It offers the best price to performance balance. It has
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good power consumption. If you get it with a good aftermarket cooler, it's
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going to be very, very quiet. and it just kills in Starcraft 2 because even
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though Starcraft 2 will run on a 5-year-old card, in order to get the
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most out of it, play HD resolution, turn up anti-aliasing. You will need a
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GeForce GPU at this time to enable anti-aliasing, by the way, but you're
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going to want a fairly beefy graphics card in order to actually run it at full
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strength. So, here you can see the uh
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Vesta i5 3200 SLI is the recommended config. It has a GTX 460 in it. And then
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if you click here when you get this newsletter, it'll actually take you to
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the Starcraft 2 GPU performance comparison that they do on hardware
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connects. So this uh actually leads us to our recommendation, the GTX 461 gig.
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And and there's another piece of news that's pretty cool is that if you're
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like me and you missed out on the beta, because I would have loved to do some
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testing on Starcraft 2 before release, but I didn't have a chance. Uh if you
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buy a GTX 460 after the Starcraft launch, you actually get a coupon to try
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Starcraft 2 for seven hours uh with multiplayer. So it'll have full support
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for the game for 7 hours. So you can actually find out if you like it, find
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out how well it runs on your new GeForce card, and then buy the game if you're
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not entirely sure. Thanks for checking out my video blog and don't forget to
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subscribe to the NCIX newsletter as well as to my Linus Tech Tips video blog.